Citrix PVS 7.6 Install – Part 13: Testing Published Applications

This is final article in the Citrix Provisioning Services 7.6 installation and configuration guide. Here we will be testing the published applications to ensure that our environment is working as planned.

Step-by-Step Guide

At this point we have now completely integrated our Citrix PVS 7.6 target devices (i.e. Citrix Application Servers) with our existing Citrix XenApp 7.6 environment. We have published the applications that are running on the PVS Target Devices as Citrix published applications.

If all works well, we should be able to launch these applications from the Citrix Store. These are the steps I used to test my published applications hosted on PVS streamed Citrix application servers:

1. Launch a browser and navigate to the Citrix Store’s URL. From here, log in with your credentials

2. Click on the Plus, select All Apps and then click on the PVS hosted published applications

In this instance the two applications I published from the PVS Target Devices were:

Active Directory Administrative Center

Group Policy Management

3. The apps will be added to your favourites

4. Click on an app to launch it

5. The Citrix Receiver will start and log you into one of the two PVS target devices and then commence the launching of the application

6. If all goes well, the Group Policy Management application should launch

7. Checking Citrix Receiver’s Connection Center we can see that we have logged in and launch Group Policy Management from the WP-CTXAPP-V03 PVS Target Device

Conclusion

And that is it! After 13 posts, we have finally gotten to the end of the Citrix PVS 7.6 install and configure series.

I hope you have enjoyed it! Good luck with your PVS implementation.

Let me know if you need any help.

Luca

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Comments

Hello Luca,
Hope you are doing well mate. Thanks for the PVS post but want to check if the same configuration can be used for the live production as I need to implement PVS in my company.
Hope to hear from you soon.
Thanks again
Regards,
Pavan

This is more of a test lab setup. If you need it for production then you would need to consider number of machines \ VDI that you will need to deploy, criticality of the solution you are running on PVS. In other words you would need to consider redundancy and availability of the entire solution, from SQL to the PVS server(s). In addition you would need to consider the regular backup or protection of the PVS images.

At this stage I don’t have anything documented, but I will surely think about it and when I have documented will add it as part 14. Maintenance or updating PVS images are pretty awesome though, because there is built in version control.

So if you right click on an image and select Versions, you will be able to manage the version control of the image. So let’s say you want to include some MS patches into your image. From the versions window, click New to create a new version. It will set the new version in development mode, which allows you to boot into it in read\write mode without impacting production. From here, you do your updates and power down.

You can then set the new version into testing mode. Again you can boot into it and test it, without affecting production. Finally when its ready to go, just promote it into production and on the next reboot of your targets, they will automatically use the new version with the patches included.

You can also revert back to an old version at any stage. Versions work similar to snapshots on a virtual machine, so it is recommended by Citrix to have no more than 5. When you get to more than 5, you can just merge in the oldest version into the base image.

Hi Luca, Thank You for this awesome work. I was looking for something like this and this article is way better than what i was expecting initially :D, I am planning to deploy PVS 7.6 in our infra and your demonstration has helped me a lot. All articles are very nicely crafted and answer all possible queries. Thanks Again. Hope to see more such article from you maybe on AppV 🙂

Became fan of your Articles Luca.. By far, this is a pretty well explained version of PVS I have come across.. Thanks a lot for the post n making my doubts clear.. On the way to get through your next articles.. 🙂

wow, such a great article. Keep up the good work.We are going to Introduce VDI in our environment , this Step by Step really helps..
Note sure if you already posted but if i have to add additional PVS Server how do i replicate the stores?